I agree with all of this. As Matt Margini wrote in the Boss Fights Book on RDR (which, by the way, is my all time favorite book about any video game, highly recommended it), we have to suffer through the "college-dorm-film-buff tastes of the Houser brothers" in the GTA games. The fact that they do get recognition for their writing just shows how painfully low the bar is for narrative in AAA games. I do think, however, that RDR does add some new dimensions to the Western genre by virtue of its interactivity, cliches notwithstanding.